The Toymaker: Excerpts

Trotter was given a reprieve from having to carry everyone. Too treacherous to be riding anything in caves, Ren said, even with an electric torch. He led the way, marking their path with their single circle of light. The cave angled down comfortably so, but the way was an obstacle course of jutting rocks and deep potholes. Then it became another maze of stalagmites and great pillars of stone like yellow, congealed foam. Somewhere in the cold, moist darkness, water dripped.

“Reminds me a bit of the junk cave,” Ren said. “Only a little more damp, and crowded.”

Ashima frowned, her gaze darting to places that could be hiding anything, like bats, or rats, or Beasts that preferred to live underground. The cave continued to descend. They entered a tunnel so narrow it forced them to walk single file. It was a horrible tightness in some places, making it easy to believe that it would only get smaller until they could no longer move, or breathe, and Ashima’s heart resumed its mad fluttering. Trotter got stuck, twice, taking everyone to push and pull him through. Ashima wasn’t kind about it. She tried to be, but the longer Trotter was stuck, the more thin the air felt, as though the walls were moving in to crush them all.

“Is it much longer?” Ashima whimpered.

“I don’t know,” Ren grunted through clenched teeth. “Tight way ahead. Trotter, you need to get as low as you can.”

There was also ducking, sometimes a bit of crawling, and sometimes a bit of sliding. The deeper they went, the surer Ashima became that they would never see the surface again. They would go deeper and deeper straight into the fiery bowels of the world…

“Ah!” Ren shouted in triumph.

Ashima jumped. “What! What is it!?” She reached out to follow the wall that, moments ago, had been scraping her sides. Her fingers grabbed open air instead.

“A cavern,” Ren said. “A big cavern, by the looks.” The light danced over a wide floor of glittering black rock. They had entered some sort of void, no end to it in sight, making Ashima suddenly miss the tightness of the tunnels.

“What’s this?” Ren said, kneeling. Ashima moved next to him and bent forward. The light was cast down, reflecting off a floor speckled with small, faceted crystals as clear as polished glass.

“That looks like star stone,” Ashima breathed. She brushed a finger over one of the crystals. It felt as smooth and clean as it looked.

“If it is…” Ren said. He didn’t reach into the bag this time, he reached into his coat pocket. He removed his bit of star stone and held it close to a crystal on the floor.

The stone began to glow, and the cave’s crystal with it, along with the crystals next to it in a chain reaction of light. The void was no longer a void, it was a night sky full of a million stars, and Ashima and Ren and all the golems were floating in it. Ashima pulled her own crystal from her own pocket and added it to the night, and twice as many crystals glittered back at her, great rivers of them and clusters and lonely specks of the purest white. All that was missing was a moon.

“Wow,” she whispered.

“Wow is right,” Ren whispered back.
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